


So I Guess That I've Got It Bad

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Series: Pynch Drabbles [6]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Living Together, M/M, Magic, but i started writing this before i ever read cdth so tdt has no bearing here lmao, okay this is definitely post-canon for trc bc i imagine theyre in their 20s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:00:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25606993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: They sit on the windowsill, almost humming.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Series: Pynch Drabbles [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/887724
Kudos: 25





	So I Guess That I've Got It Bad

**Author's Note:**

> this has been sitting nearly complete in my drafts for MONTHS
> 
> title from bridgit mendler's rocks at my window bc thts my right as a fic writer

Ronan remembered seeing them once on the windowsill at St. Agnes. When it was easier to look there or at his hands clenched before him or at the floor instead of at Adam because there were too many things already being unmade for them to change the way they were too. They seemed out of place on that peeling paint, out of time. He never saw them there again.

Times changed. There, haven, Adam eyed them apprehensively, here, home, Adam drew his fingers over the backs of each of them. One, two, three, four, five, six; lined up on the windowsill instead of where they'd collected in a heavy crystalline bowl on the counter by the back door. Ronan didn't know where the fuck they came from, and he wasn't inclined to find out; he'd done enough investigating to last a lifetime. They were material, real, that was all he knew and that was enough. No dream fuckery here, just the thick rope of gravity flapping in the wind as the bell tolled.

The golden line of his neck crooking farther, nearly knocking the crown of his head against the windowpane, Adam exhaled. A breath so close to a wing scraping the air, ragged, tired, purposeful. His eyes were far away, farther than the creatures out back, farther than the distant landscape. He touched them again, fine, slender fingers not grasping, not taking. Eyelashes on purple skin, the palest shade it had been in years.

Adam was listening.

Ronan was watching.

In a way, it was a decent, albeit overly-simple summation of life thus far. In a way, it was purely indicative of both their natures and how they managed to trail together without choking the other out. Root rot was a damn hard thing to accomplish with aeration like this.

Ronan was a master of the budgeted silence, so he carefully scraped together the spare minutes. Let himself peer curiously as Adam tapped each of his charges in time--a curious, xylophonic movement--before straightening back out. Just like that, he'd satisfied the compulsion. Or rather, Ronan assumed it was compulsionn, but with Adam's prime loyalty to schedule, his sworn duty to time, it might just as well be calculated. Then again, it might be some psychic curation too. Another new thing for Ronan to learn because these days they were everchanging, and sometimes it was best not ask, just understand.

Either way it fell, he filed it away in the second to last box in his head. The mulling one. Made for mulling. But only when he was properly snatched up in feeling a certain type of way. The box was not labelled Adam because that would be trite, nor was it anywhere near approaching being an amalgamation of them, but it _was_ shaded vaguely in the same hue he took on in Ronan's dreams. Ronan, afterall, was not entirely averse to organizational standards, no matter what testimony there might be to the contrary. That was hearsay, _he_ was contrary.

"So that's done," he stated simply, inclining his chin to Adam's little brood. Six. Ronan didn't like the number. Too much and not enough and suspiciously scaly feeling on his thoughts, but to say why would sound too much like superstition and he liked to be the only fable around. Seven, though, that was a sound number.

Adam finally hauled his eyes up, mouth pinching into a smile at the corner that showed hard-won lines digging into his skin. He was staggeringly young in that moment--in honesty, not age. He was still weathered, but the split second when his eyes crinkled up at Ronan promised he still had time enough.

"Probably," he hedged. Touching the pads of his fingers to his forehead, he pushed fringe back.

Without explanation, Ronan had always had an affinity for the last four months and the first three of the year. It was as absurd as it was inexplicable, but there it was. And in the spirit of that particular brand of Lynch prognostication, he was the only one to ever figure out the why of it. Generally, that was when Adam let his hair grow out--not too long, but not shorn short as it was come faithfully every April. As if May was a battle to prepare for and June, July, August was another foe.

Now it was June and Adam had to brush the fringe back from his forehead; now it was June and if Ronan was a couple feet closer, he could brush the fringe back from Adam's forehead himself, no questions asked.

"There's still another," Adam said, almost like he'd just discovered the thought. He put his palm on the windowsill, casting his knuckles and scars in light from a peachy sun. His eyes closed before he added, "It feels like there's supposed to be one more."

Ronan kept his mouth resolutely shut so as not to exude the smugness bucking against his molars that would get him nowhere fast. In confidence with his mind, though, he sharked a grin and thought _ha_ and _seven._

"Where'd the rest come from? You probably left one behind. Cruel of you."

They both knew Adam was too thorough for that, but assuming he had to fuck up one of these days, there was always the possibility.

He thumbed idly at the littlest one on the end of the row, smooth and shaded in like beachstone, as his brow furrowed. "I didn't tell you?" he asked, and Ronan, for his part, didn't let that fan his feathers because he was _collected_ and wasn't going to peacock for the fact that he had the confidence of Adam Parrish. The disbelieving that he hadn't shared this one mundane thing like all their other mundane things.

"If the next sentence out of your mouth is _they_ found _you_ , I'm calling my priest to exorcise the little bastards," Ronan muttered, pinching at his leather bands idly for want of something to do with his hands. The nonchalance they offered him wasn't all that bad either.

Adam's befuddlement smoothed out to wrinkle into amusement and he brought his hand back to himself; with it, his focus.

Ronan could actually see the moment the ritual left him, when he slipped out from under the fantastical title and back into his name, when the ley line heaved its breath and returned to slumbering just underneath his skin. Standing now before him was Adam, resolutely. Not a trace of Magician, which undoubtedly drew the dream from the dreamer and left Ronan _er_ , human.

"It's like a hot poker." He jammed his thumb just below his sternum, glancing underneath his tawny eyebrows to gauge Ronan's reaction.

"You get heartburn if you don't rescue a pebble," he deadpanned. He crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his head to the side, scrutinizing the lines of Adam's face. For Ronan that meant I'm listening, for Ronan that meant keep talking.

"It doesn't burn, it just catches. And once I find one it just…seeps out. Like I have to pass the energy on to something else." He gave a rueful sort of smile. "Sounds a lot more like bullshit when I say it out loud."

Neither of them moved to point out that on a scale of one to Ronan pulling life and death from his dreams or Adam and his own kind of magic, as far as batshit went in their lives, this homing beacon wasn't much more than a quaint party trick. But the comparison was still there, unspoken, because sometimes it was leveling to point out the absurdity of things as they related to someone else's tolerance. Just to keep the playing field even.

Still, Adam sighed a particularly Adam-like sigh. The kind so broad and here that it made _Ronan's_ ribs fucking burn with contentment. Adam's collecting sighs and Adam's blithe mutterings and Adam's withering looks, all falling into their places in this home. Cut to: Ronan, pleased as punch.

"I found this one one of the first times we went out looking for Glendower. When it was just you and me and Gansey and Noah," he said from nowhere in particular, rolling his honeycomb-chapsticked lips back and forth as though he was debating himself and losing. Finally, fingers hovering over the first stone, his mouth split into a grin. "I was looking for something to throw at Gansey to get him to stop talking long enough to let me think."

Ronan considered looping his arms around Adam's waist and tucking into his neck, baring his teeth against the skin in a laugh until Adam laughed too, but he could tell the story wasn't done and who the fuck was he to interrupt a geological analysis. Nevermind that sometimes he just liked to hear him talk.

Encouraged by the silence, Adam continued on to the second one in that quiet way of his. A tone Ronan knew well because it was the way Adam sounded when they were alone--like the bristles on a finishing brush, deceivingly sure and looking like they'd scuff you until you brushed your fingers over them and found them to be courteously soft.

"You remember the day I turned up with my hands all fucked up and I told you I'd gotten pitched over the handlebars on my bike coming to school? And even though me and Gansey and Noah laughed, you didn't?"

Ronan didn't have to say it was because he hadn't believed him. Adam already knew that. They'd cleared it up since then.

"This was what did it," he explained, moving to the second one--a surprisingly round, bleach-white stone. On the edge facing Ronan he could see a pinprick of blood, could imagine Adam's weeping hands grabbing up the very thing that had felled him and taking it back to his place to be sheltered and accounted for. Adam Parrish was a good home for lost things.

Over the third, so brown it was nearly red, he pronounced, "Outside St. Agnes," and that was enough.

"Stealing from the church, Parrish?"

Adam flashed a grin. "Only what goes willingly," he said, turning away before he could see the flush crawling up Ronan's pale throat.

The fourth came from Fox Way, bitter-brown and with a fracture down the middle, but despite its appearance Adam paid it special reverence.

("That one haunted or something?"

"Maybe."

"Cool.")

The fifth had apparently caused the worst of the burning to date. "It felt like I'd been put to the stake. I figured that was the price to be paid to be a magician."

Ronan wondered idly what other prices Adam felt he had to pay to live and breathe in this world, but shoved the thought away to a box that was well-weathered, almost flat. Not the time or the place.

With his fingers hovering finally over the last of the bunch, Adam scooped it up and held it on the edge of his digits, thumbing at it. This one was flat and pale and shaped like a rounded off triangle with the exception of the divot on the easternmost corner. It balanced serenely against him, almost radiating a smug grin.

"I've had this one longer than I've known any of you," he explained, and it was the first time Ronan had ever seen him think back on the first of his life without bitterness. "I was eight and it was the first day of summer. I used to walk up and down the dirt road when they sent me out of the house and I found this one digging through the ditch. You see how smooth it is? I kept it in every pillowcase I had 'til here to rub over to take my mind off things." He looked at it thoughtfully, lips twitching. "I must have rubbed a hundred layers off this thing trying not to think about you."

Ronan would be lying if he said he tried not to grin because there was no trying about it. Resting his chin to his chest, he asked, "Didn't really work, did it?" as he leaned back against the countertop Adam had kissed him against the night before and that they'd collected breakfast on together that morning.

"No, not really," Adam agreed, adding solemnly, "Probably for the best."

"'Probably?'"

"At least eighty percent."

"Could've argued for seventy-five," Ronan said, thinking then that all he wanted to do was kiss Adam until the world became an end. If there was any activity he'd choose for when the sun imploded and swallowed Earth whole, kissing Adam was a close second to probably nothing if he'd done his math right.

"I'll keep that in mind." He thumbed absently along the nearest face of it, the wrinkles on the back of his thumb expanding and contracting with each twitch of movement. Something out the window had his undivided attention until it didn't at all. He turned to look at Ronan, smiling half-amused. "Come here."

Ronan kicked off the counter and ambled over, standing with only Adam's cradled hand blocking the path between them. He grabbed Ronan's hand and pushed the rock into it, curling his fingers shut overtop it like sealing a tomb.

Closing his hand over Ronan's and closing his lids over his eyes, Adam waited for him to do the same. With the faintest protest, Ronan shut his eyes too and waited. Usually, if you closed your eyes and waited long enough around there, something would come by that occupied the mind for a while.

It didn't take long until Ronan felt exactly what Adam had meant him to, no further instructions required. Pushed squarely against his palm, the rock hushed them until it had their full attention, and then, slight enough to be a fluke, it shuddered.

He frowned and almost jerked back, one eye cracking open, but Adam held to their fold of hands and said, "No looking."

He loosened his grip, but kept his hand lightly atop Ronan's. At the absence of familiar pressure, leaving Ronan's to measure more, the rock grew more agitated and moved to vibrations, going in and out like aftershocks. After a few seconds of revving, Ronan undid his mouth and hand at the same time, letting his lips unfold while the rock smacked up into Adam's palm.

"I bet the pet rock guy is rolling in his grave," he said, and Adam barked a laugh as he lined it back up with the others.

**Author's Note:**

> yes each rock does correspond to a member of the gangsey :^)
> 
> i'm on tumblr @professcrlupin !!


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